David Cameron will join the leaders of other EU countries on Thursday and Friday for a special summit to discuss the EU's migration policy, following a dramatic increase in the number of irregular migrants trying to enter the EU this year. In recent months there have also been more cases of migrants drowning while trying to cross the Mediterranean.

There is a kind of loneliness here. Australia forces a sensory of self that holds no prisoners. It's a strange juxtaposition, resting somewhere between a launching pad for the fearless and a refuge for the fearful. You're exposed in your remoteness, yet somehow comforted by the thought of it.

Their first language is English (spoken with a British accent), their use of diminutives in Spanish eclipses mine, they eat Indian food as regularly as they eat tacos, one boy has long hair due to his Sikh heritage and because many a surfer in Sayulita has long hair.

Mid-January, ten years ago, the colours and sunshine of my first day in San Miguel had me pinned. A week later, I met the person who was to become my husband. Today, we are raising three young children.

By the time I flew home, I was in talks with a newspaper editor in Nairobi and had six weeks to plan my move: five months, one week and one day after R and I had first met. The nearness of my impending departure, this time with a veiled sense of permanence hanging over it, hit my mum a little more.

f you have any Cornish blood or Cornish branches in your family tree, you are most likely familiar with the adage often repeated to me by my paternal grandfather 'Gramps' Phillipps: "If there is a hole anywhere on earth, you're sure to find a Cornishman at the bottom of it."

The most recent front-pages from the Daily Express demonstrates their retreat from reality into the realm of myth... There is a very real danger of the Express co-opting and channelling a real and legitimate frustration and sense of betrayal against vulnerable migrants.

For more than a month, every day, tens of thousands of Bulgarians have taken to their streets protesting against a discredited government acting counter to the interest of its people. Scratch the surface and this distant, seemingly abstract, revolution on the EU's Eastern-most edge suddenly becomes relevant to citizens and taxpayers of all European nations.

After the Olympics, the British are patriotic but pessimistic, it seems. A recent survey and report undertaken at the University of Huddersfield found that six out of ten people would like to emigrate but want to move to a country that shares a sense of Britishness and its values.